Union Académique Internationale

Project nº37, adopted in 1979

The project Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari (Corpus of Coptic Literary Manuscripts) was initiated in 1970 and received patronage of UAI-IUA in 1979. It is conceived and planned around the objective of assembling photographic reproductions of all known manuscripts in Copto- Sahidic, one of the early languages of the Christian Egypt, especially those coming from the Monastery of Shenute. The library of the monastery of Apa Shenute in the site (mountain) of Atripe, near Shmin (Panopolis, Achmim) was the most important repository of Coptic literary texts, in fact comprising almost all of them. It was in use until ca. the 13th century CE, when the Copts adopted the Arabic language for their literary texts, and the Coptic codices were transferred into a small room in the building of the main church, where they were subject to unavoidable decay and other damage due to the invasion of the monastery by foreigners. When interest in the Coptic manuscripts arose among Western scholars, from the middle of the 18th century onwards, the monks began to sell small groups of folios, stripped from the codices, on the antiquarian market, and eventually these fragments formed the Coptic collections in European (later also American) libraries and museums: in Rome (Vatican city), Oxford, Venice, London, Vienna and many other places. At the end of the 19th century, Eugène Revillout and Gaston Maspero discovered the place from which the manuscripts originated, and succeeded in acquiring all that remained, ca. one third of the entire remains, for the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Obviously the reconstruction of the history of Coptic literature, completely ignored until the 19th century and today still far from satisfactory, must begin with the recovery of the original codices, whose leaves are kept in different collections, and thereby the recovery of the individual works. The best way to achieve this was to form a collection of the photos of all the fragments, so that scholars could easily browse through them to discover which fragments are complementary to each other in having belonged to the same original codex. Such was the aim of the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari. But it soon became evident that the photos must be accompanied by a systematic and analytical archive in which all relevant information on the manuscripts themselves, and also on Coptic literature in its various manifestations, could be stored and retrieved. The basic goals of the research project, as presented to the Union Académique Internationale when the patronage was requested, may now be considered fulfilled. The collections of manuscripts around the world, so far known to scholars, are all listed, and an inventory of the codices or fragments preserved is ready, containing their identification, edition where existing, and bibliography. Also the history of the manuscripts after the dispersal from the original library in Egypt is recorded. In fact the project was declared complete in 2014, but its results continue to be updated and placed at the disposition of scholars in the internet.The organization of the project will continue to work, in order to keep data updated, in its two sees of Roma (Istituto Patristico Augustinianum) and Hamburg (Hiob Ludolf Zentrum, University of Hamburg). New manuscripts eventually found in future will be acquired in reproduction; the bibliography will be adjourned; the Clavis Coptica will be augmented following the day by day progress in the study of the Coptic literature; new texts will be published and linguistically analyzed. The responsible Academy is the Unione Accademica Italiana, with the partnership of Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere (Milano). The research is developed according to the following lines: Study and catalogation of the collections preserving Coptic manuscripts which contain literary texts. Acquisition of the reproduction of those manuscripts, which are archived and catalogued. Identification of the content of the texts, and of their originals or parallels in Greek patristic literature. Acquisition of any kind of information and blibliography concerning the Coptic literature. Reconstruction of the dismembered codices of the Monastery of Apa Shenoute at Atripe (Sohag). Edition and syntactic analysis of the texts. Arrangement of all information in a public web page, always updated. Special attention is devoted to the reconstruction of the codices of the library of the Monastery of Shenoute, the largest library of Coptic Egypt. They were dismembered and disseminated all over the world. Many of them have been reconstructed, but given the condition of the survived material there will never be an end to the work. A complete bibliography concerning the Coptic literature is available, and it is constantly updated. The results of the project are mainly published in the web page of the project.